Dapple
by Glinda
Summary: 9Doc The Doctor dreams


dapple DAP-uhl, noun:  
1. A small contrasting spot or blotch.  
2. A mottled appearance, especially of the coat of an animal (as a horse).

transitive verb:  
To mark with patches of a color or shade; to spot.

intransitive verb:  
To become dappled.

adjective:  
Marked with contrasting patches or spots; dappled.

_I lock the door and lock my head_

_And dream of butterflies instead _

_The beauty of their colored wings _

_The trees, the grass and pretty things _

_Imagination fills the void of my existence – K's Choice : Butterflies Instead_

The sunlight has that strange quality it always does in dreams and memories. Even within the privacy of his own mind he cannot forget that this time is long gone. A young girl with short dark hair and darker eyes is twirling around in the long grass. She's laughing out loud in sheer delight. The trees move gently in the breeze, creating a play of light and shade that slides across her face, draws attention to her freckles and brings out a slight red highlight in her hair. 'Who did she inherit that from?' he wonders. Her mother? Her father? Does she look like a child of his or someone they loved. Will he meet someone who looks like her and become her grandmother? Of course it's all academic now.

Her face is turned upwards, her eyes closed. She's surrounded by one of the clouds of butterflies that are this planet's sole inhabitants. A planet that exists for only a week by some freak of chance and nature. He only stumbled on it by accident and thought it might make a pleasant diversion for her. Watching her child-like joy at the fearless-ness of these creatures with their brief, busy lives reminds him how little of her childhood really remains. She'll be a young woman soon. He has so many fears for her, his little unearthly child. In that moment he realises that he loves her utterly. He'd always known he cared for her, treasured her, but he knows it now. Knows that he'd do anything to keep her as happy as she is right now. He feels guilty for taking her from her life on Gallifrey. She should have had a normal, safe, secure childhood. She deserves the suburban security of a life he's never known, never wanted.

She nearly breaks her heart when she discovers the planet's doomed. So he builds the Butterfly room for her. And it delights her. She lights up like that day every time she stands there covered in her beloved every-changing, multi-coloured pets. And one day on an ordinary day on a planet ravaged by the creatures who will one day destroy their home world, he watches a young man make her light up the way the butterflies do. Humans live such brief lives, yet they pack so much into them. She'll outlive this boy by as much as a human outlives a butterfly, but her life will be brighter for him. He sees her now, no longer a child. A young woman. She deserves her shot at normality. He'll come back to see how she gets on and if she likes normality when her human boy has gone he'll take her back to Gallifrey, if not then he'll have no guilt in taking her travelling once again.

It takes him longer to go back for her than he intends but he makes sure David's gone before he does. She deserves her normality it might be all either of them get. They answer Gallifrey's call and soon they're up to their eyes in the battle. Forty year on Earth have tempered her innocence and toughened her up, but her idealism could give his own a run for it's money and the anger the drives her makes him wince with the pain of the familiar. They know more about fighting Daleks than then whole rest of their people combined but that doesn't mean the bureaucrats actually listen to them. But the devil certainly drives and the Time Lords have been shaken down from their pedestals and into action. Things once considered unthinkable are done so often they become commonplace. Carnage, death and destruction reign throughout the universe as planets, solar-systems, whole sub-universes (E-space is collapsed destroying a fleet of Daleks 10 times the size of the one which will someday menace the Gamestation) fall victim to the war between the Daleks and the Time Lords.

He's sure that it's hopeless, that they're going to die. Completely, in a way that regeneration cannot reverse. Yet she faces it without fear. With a certainty that so long as they take the Daleks with them it will all have been worthwhile. And in the heat of battle with death hanging over them she has never looked more alive, and he understands why she fights so hard. Because she knows no other way to be. He will never know her parents or her grandmother but he will never doubt their kinship. No one planet or time could ever contain either of them and they'd have it no other way. There's so much he still has to show her, which makes it all the more unfair when he survives and she vanishes.

He wakes in a cold sweat, in a room full of butterflies to see a concerned Rose watching him. She tells him he was yelling in his sleep, in a language the TARDIS won't translate. He cannot give her an answer no matter how he longs to, there are some things too painful for words. So he takes her to a planet that only existed for a week by some freak of chance and nature and is inhabited entirely by butterflies. She laughs and dances and the sun through the trees creates patterns of dappled light on her face and hair. He watches her remembering another girl who danced there till he feels a hand slip into his. Short dark hair and familiar eyes. A head on his shoulder. An understanding and knowing look. A quiet whisper and she's gone as though she was never there. And perhaps she never was.

The words come back on a space station thousands of year in the linear future of that day. She said that humans were like butterflies, their brief, busy lives amuse and bemuse us, yet we forget that with a beat of their wings they can change a world for good or bad. A glowing innocent saves him and ends a war not her own. And a Rose beats her wings…


End file.
